Let me start this off by stating the obvious: the World War II genre is growing old and tired. I don’t know how many more times I can grit my teeth and push my way through another cookie-cutter World War II shooter before I totally lose it. Nothing extraordinary has been done with this genre since the very first Medal of Honor hit the Sony Playstation and I think gamers are getting just a little bit tired of it. So, why then are you seeing relatively high scores for this particular WW II game at the top of this page? Simple: this isn’t your standard cookie-cutter WW II FPS. This is something different...
Brothers In Arms puts you in the shoes of Sgt Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne Division, 502nd PIR, 2nd Battalion, Fox Company on D-Day as you drop near St. Martin-de-Varreville to fight your way to Utah Beach with the task of thinning out the Germans to minimalize allied casualties. The game kicks things off with quite a bang as you take heavy anti-aircraft fire as you and your squad leap from a bullet-ridden airplane and parachute to the ground below in the middle of the night. It truly sets the stage for what you will soon find to be one of the most intense and engaging WWII-themed games to date.
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is more than an FPS. It certainly retains the key elements that you would find in a standard FPS, but it also deals out a real healthy dose of team-based combat strategy. The most obvious description would be that Brothers in Arms is Full Spectrum Warrior with a World War II theme, and the ability to aim and fire your own weapons. Rather than throw you down a path shooting every enemy that foolishly jumps out in front of you, you will instead find that your enemy is relatively smart and will attempt to employ similar tactics to those that you will be using such as flanking, and leading you into ambushes.
The strategic elements in this game are not overly complicated. In fact, it is the ease-of-use approach that makes this facet of the game so much fun to use. It’s simply the most intelligent approach I have ever seen implemented into a tactical FPS on a console controller. Issuing orders is made ridiculously easy by making the left trigger your primary means for issuing any and all orders to your men. To send them to a specific place, press and hold the left trigger and move the cursor to where you want them to go with the left thumb-stick and release it. Your men will immediately make their way to the designated spot. If you want them to lay suppressive fire on a group of spotted enemies, hold the left trigger and move the targeting reticule to the enemies position and release: they will find cover, and keep the enemy busy until you give them the order to let up, buying you time to flank your distracted enemies. If you want to command your squad to charge an enemy that is pinned down behind a bunker, simply hold the left trigger, point it at the bunker and pull the right trigger. If you want your squad to form up alongside you, just hold down the white button, and if you need to switch between different squads, just tap the white button. All of these commands are issued in game as you play, and as complicated as it might seem, it becomes extremely natural after just a few minutes of play. There are also various stages in the game where you will be commanding a tank in addition to your squad and thankfully, the commands are exactly the same.
Another side to the strategy elements found in Brothers in Arms is the ability to pause the action and back out to a larger view of the battlefield. It’s a handy little feature that lets you think about how you want to handle a group of enemies based on your immediate surroundings. At first I found this to be rather cheesy, but I soon found out that it’s not the handicap that it first appears to be. Enemies that you haven’t spotted will not appear in this mode, and your viewpoint is usually pretty limited so that you can’t see everything on the battlefield. What it basically does is display the cover and sometimes alternate routes between you and your enemies. From this screen, you can choose a spot where you think your squad could lay suppressive fire successfully, and then try to find a path to the side or behind your enemy for the almighty flanking maneuver. It gives you just enough help to determine your best plan of action, without hinting you in on any potential variables that could throw a wrench in your plans such as an unseen German patrolling the path that you are about to try to take by yourself to flank the enemy.
The other major aspect of Brothers in Arms is the obvious shooting elements. It works much like any other FPS does but with a catch: there are no crosshairs. Granted, you can turn them on if you like, but not only would you be denying yourself some of the most suspenseful moments ever in any WW II game, but your hip-shots seem to be pretty inaccurate even with the crosshairs turned on. The whole point here is that you need to pull your rifle up to your shoulder and aim with the real sights by clicking the right thumb-stick, and in doing so, you move much more slowly. I have heard a lot of people groan about this; if you want to run circles around your enemies, then you should play Halo. In real life, you can’t accurately fire a weapon while running sideways or running circles around your opponents... you just can’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will never fire your weapon from the hips though either. In fact, it’s a great way to keep an enemy soldier pinned down while you make your way across an open area. Just don’t expect to get many hits this way as the enemy is pretty good at finding cover and using it well when they feel threatened. Other actions are more of the same: reload, change weapons, and the jump button are all here.
The AI in Brothers in Arms isn’t too bad either. For the most part, your men will be smart enough to find cover if they are caught out in the open by the enemy. Occasionally, they would venture out too far and pay the ultimate price for it, but this was not a common occurrence. The enemies are also quick to find cover when they are in danger, and they will even try to outsmart you from time to time. Many times I observed my enemies reacting to what I was doing by trying to outsmart me, and a few times, I was taken down with the very same strategies that I myself was trying to pull off.
The presentation of Brothers In Arms easily surpasses anything that has previously been done on a console concerning World War II. Gearbox did their homework here and it certainly shows. Everything that you come across looks real and gritty. Some textures look rough up close, but that’s really just nit picking when you put it into perspective: draw distances are nice and long, and details abound everywhere you look, from the trees to the German armor. All of the animations are well done and realistic, and the gloomy color scheme is, for the lack of a better word, perfect. Even the little things go a long way in making the experience as realistic and suspenseful as possible. Try to foolishly peek your head around a corner while pinned down by an enemy MG and you may just get a face full of dirt and debris, and that’s if your lucky.
The sound is equally impressive. While the whole dramatic musical score is nothing new, it does a great job: having a WW II game without it would be like playing a Star Wars game without the familiar Star Wars theme: you’ve heard it a million times over, but it would be terribly wrong without it. The music is by far the least exciting part of the sounds in Brothers In Arms though. It’s the effects that really complete the experience in this game. Explosions will rattle you, every shot that you here will make you scramble for cover, and the ambient sound effects of the stages themselves really round out a great aural experience. This game is responsible for creating some of the most intense moments I have ever experienced in a videogame and a lot of that had to do with the excellent sound. Hearing your men yelling to you for your leadership as you are taking heavy fire with explosions in every direction is truly something that no self-respecting gamer should miss.
Multiplayer was surprisingly fun. You can play on Live, System Link, and even split-screen. It’s unique in that you won’t be playing the usual death-match multiplayer games: it mostly consists of scenarios with people choosing to side with the axis forces or the allies and then commanding their own squad to complete their objectives. It’s quite a bit of fun, and I have to add that it’s much more rewarding to thwart your human enemies using tactics as well as good FPS skills rather than the usual “running in circles” death-matches. I would also like to point out that a lot of people are going to appreciate the fact that Gearbox included split screen multiplayer options... something that is a rarity these days.
I do have a few things to complain about with Brothers In Arms. The most glaringly obvious instances would certainly be the fact that the jump button is pretty much useless. There are times where you think you have the ultimate strategy, only to have the whole thing snowball on you because you and your squad can’t jump over a 2-foot mound of dirt. Another issue is that if one of your men dies, he will be back for the next mission. Obviously this makes things considerably less realistic, which will certainly disappoint some of you out there, but I personally didn’t mind it at all. The story has to carry on, so your men HAVE to survive. A scripted story would be hard to tell if its main characters could really die permanently. I’ll trade that kind of harsh realism for a good story any day of the week.
Brothers In Arms is a fantastic game. It blends the elements of strategy with the all-too-common FPS genre like no other game has done before it on a console. The graphics are gritty and realistic, the sounds will make you nervous as hell, and the immense feeling of accomplishment that comes with successfully executing a good strategic assault both in the single-player campaigns as well as multiplayer is overwhelming. Do yourself a favor and grab every Medal of Honor game you have, grab the yawn-fest that is Call of Duty, bring them down to your local gaming shop, and trade them all in for Brothers In Arms. I guarantee you won’t be missing them once you sink your teeth into this game. Gearbox put a lot of work into making this game as authentic as possible and it truly shows. This is the WW II game that you have been waiting for.
